AIM was dead to me until a few weeks ago when they intro­duced Face­book Chat inte­gra­tion. Now it looks like I’m always on Face­book which prob­a­bly has some of my friends and fam­ily ques­tion­ing what exactly I do with my free time (like they didn’t already). Let me show you the quick and easy way that lets me always be on Face­book Chat (and AIM).

First, whip out your iPhone or iPod Touch and either launch or down­load the free AIM app [iTunes link]. If you haven’t  skipped ahead, you’ll need to link your Face­book account and AIM account which you can do within the app.

Now, go to ‘Pref­er­ences’ under the ‘Me’ tab. Scroll down and under “when exit­ing AIM…” you’ll see the option for “Sign off” after a period of time. I choose ‘After 24 Hours’ which means that if at any time dur­ing a day I launch the AIM app, I’ll be signed in until the next day. If I get at least one IM via AIM or Face­book per day, I’ll always be connected!

You’ll also notice AIM allows you to turn Push noti­fi­ca­tions On while dis­abling SMS noti­fi­ca­tions. This means every time some­one IMs you, it is free. When you unlock your iPhone to answer, it opens up the AIM app, you quickly sign on, and are ready to have a conversation.

I don’t mind being avail­able 24/7 but I under­stand it’s not for every­one. I’ve def­i­nitely chat­ted more with my Face­book friends in the past cou­ple of weeks with this enabled. Con­ver­sa­tions spark on my way out the door, and I can leave my lap­top while still con­tin­u­ing to respond as I’m on the L. It works the other way, too. I’ve noticed that Face­book Chat con­ver­sa­tions started in AIM show up min­i­mized the next time I log into Face­book so I can con­tinue chat­ting or look back at what we were talk­ing about.

I’ll save the para­noid con­spir­a­cies about why or why not Face­book is log­ging all of your chats for another day. In the mean time, let’s chat.

Update

Jere­miah Hes­ter (@pixelnated) brought Meebo [iTunes Link] to my atten­tion that also has push noti­fi­ca­tions for AIM and a range of other IM net­works. Do you have a favorite or more excel­lent iPhone app examples?